


Alanis Is Alanis

by KLStarre



Category: Not Another D&D Podcast (Podcast)
Genre: (Relatively), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Betrayal, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/F, Flashbacks, Gen, Not sure what to tag this one gang, Past Relationship(s), Ulfgar (Not Another D&D Podcast)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-18 16:22:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21530299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KLStarre/pseuds/KLStarre
Summary: Alanis has a good memory, which isn't necessarily a good thing.(Or, what happened when Alanis left the Fey Wild to try to distract Thiala. Spoilers through episode 84)
Relationships: Alanis/Thiala (Not Another D&D Podcast)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 36





	Alanis Is Alanis

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for some messed up mind control-related trauma! Also, the mechanics I use for Alanis in this are based on the concept of her being an Evocation Wizard, especially the "Sculpt Spells" and [modified] "Overchannel" abilities. Also, Murph mentioned on the Episode 84 Short Restthat she can regain spell slots as legendary actions, which is the coolest shit.

The thing about high elves is that they live for thousands of years and so the other thing about high elves is that their memories are long. The memories of high elves are long, in order to keep up with all that living, which is cool when you’re a wizard and trying to remember every spell you’ve ever learned or, like, a researcher into the past or even just, like, a normal elf trying to remember what you had for breakfast a hundred years ago exactly.

It’s less cool when you’ve lived five lifetimes and are working on your sixth, reflects Alanis. It’s less cool when you’ve watched the world burn and everyone you’ve ever loved die and you can remember every single detail of what their faces looked like when they thought you had betrayed them or when they betrayed each other or, like, whatever. If she were any other race, her memory would have blurred by now, would have rearranged itself or lost some of its clarity.

Of course, if she were any other race, she’d be long dead. So.

She’d heard somewhere, maybe from Thiala when she was giving one of her lectures, that weed fucked with your memory. Or killed brain cells, or something. She hadn’t really been paying attention, but it had sounded fake. Nevertheless, sometime around timeline number three, being mind-controlled and made to kill and kill and kill by a woman she’d thought had loved her, she’d stopped smoking for fun and started smoking all the time.

It hasn’t made a difference. She’s got too many brain cells to kill, maybe. Or too many damn memories. (She’s tried R. Cane a couple times, too, but uppers, it turns out, are _not_ good for her. Her mind runs too fast at the best of times already.)

Alanis steps through the portal into the Galaderon Glades and freezes up, she can’t help it. It’s only for a second, but it feels like longer, feels like she’s walking to meet the Watchman with Thiala and Ulfgar and they’ve only known each other a few weeks and the world hasn’t fallen apart yet. She can remember the way Ulfgar smelled, covered in sweat and the residue of her perfume, and the way Thiala’s laugh rang as she made fun of them for hooking up and thinking she wouldn’t notice. Had she been jealous, then? Had that been the start of it?

Alanis knows it wasn’t her fault. She knows Thiala made her own choices, over and over. But, nevertheless. Nevertheless.

The Glades are quiet and Alanis is on edge because of it. She knows there are Chosen here, knows Thiala must have someone on full time scry duty. She throws up a Protection Against Evil and Good because, hey, it’s only a first level, and maybe Thiala and her fucking angels really are celestials. Can’t hurt.

Nothing happens. The trees rustle around her as a gust of wind blows by and she starts, whips around to look behind her, sees nothing. This is ridiculous. The point is to create a distraction, not to sneak around and try not to get caught.

Alanis knows what Thiala will attempt if she catches her. She’s spent hundreds of years trying not to think about it but it’s hard when every time she hears Thiala’s name her hands freeze up for a second, hands that she needs to cast, in a desperate attempt to not let them be used by someone who isn’t her.

Fuck, she needs a joint. She fumbles for one and then stops herself because as little effect as it actually has on her, these days, she wants to be at full capacity. And also because the smell of it reminds her of passing one back and forth as they travelled through the woods, her and Ulfgar and, eventually, Thiala, who had coughed and rolled her eyes and passed it back immediately but smiled the whole time. Alanis often thinks of things as before she and Thiala loved each other, or while they loved each other, or after they loved each other. Usually, she thinks of going to the Watchman as before. But right now, alone in the woods, picturing Thiala’s single dimple, she’s not as sure.

Shit. Whatever. Time to get this over with. She’s not going to lose this time.

“I know you’re here,” she says out loud, and usually her voice is pretty level, but she throws it up toward the sky – a trick she learned in the Fey – and it echoes through the trees, bouncing toward the destroyed home of the Watchmen. Alanis loves her new heroes, but they’re even more of a mess than she and Thiala and Ulfgar were, sometimes.

She hears them move before she sees them, a group of five or seven or ten Chosen tramping through the forest toward her. Alanis has never understood the point of plate. It makes you obvious and, besides, there’s nothing a suit made of metal is going to do to protect you against a Fireball. Which is what she uses, burning a sixth level and watching them try to dive out of the way. Only one of them makes it, and she finishes him off with a cantrip, a response so second-nature that she doesn’t even register which one it is. The rest smoke in their armor, in a pile together.

Alanis wants to feel triumphant, like she did obliterating those fucking losers with Hardwon and Beverly and Moonshine and Balnor, but instead she just feels sick. Killing people who don’t stand a chance is less fun when she’s alone and has the space to think about how they probably love Thiala, too. Alanis doubts she’s bothered to magically control them all, but they’re all following her hopefully, believing her fucking fascist cause, thinking they’re doing the right thing, which isn’t much different.

The next group makes the mistake of coming at her in a line, military-perfect, and she Lightning Bolts them into oblivion. She’s not a war caster, she’s never wanted to be a war caster – she wanted to be an _inventor_ – but she’ll be damned if she isn’t good at it, after all these years.

Chosen after Chosen come for her, and none of them even get close. She’s paying attention to her spell slots, keeping her 9th level open for the Dominate Person she’ll need to Counterspell, and a few other lower levels for good measure, but even so, the bodies pile up. She can pick them off one at a time with cantrips, she can blow a Chain Lightning on four that look maybe a little stronger and destroy their bodies to the point of no return, she can do whatever she wants and they die, anyway. Which is ridiculous. If Thiala cared even at all about a single member of her brainwashed army, she’d have told them how to fight an Archmage, how to spread out and surround and get in close. But she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. They’re a means to an end, just like –

Alanis cuts off _that_ line of thought with a Cloudkill that she focuses on, strengthens, makes as powerful as it can be and then releases above the clearing they’re in, marking herself as immune and no one else.

It drops twenty-five of them at once. She’s not super into poison, usually – much prefers the rush of lightning and fire – but it gets the job done in a way nothing else does. Absent-mindedly, she regenerates a spell slot. This is not the game that she is here to play, and she points with an ash-stained arm to the nearest Chosen, a halfling woman who looks scared but, for some reason, still determined. “Where’s Thiala?” Alanis asks because, yeah, this is a distraction, but Alanis has ulterior motives, too. Alanis always has ulterior motives. Another thing she’d never wanted.

“The goddess –” Stammers the halfling woman, and Alanis waves her hand, blasts her dead with a Firebolt, and turns to the next one, a half-elf man who’s barely a man, probably not yet forty. “I didn’t ask about the goddess. I asked about Thiala. Where is Thiala?”

“I don’t –”

She puts him to sleep, tired of killing, and that’s when Thiala appears, between Alanis and the dying soldiers, resplendent. Fucking hell, that means she must have another wizard, must’ve replaced Alanis with someone without her noticing somehow, because she has too many people to keep track of and also sort of thought that maybe Thiala wouldn’t have moved on yet.

Stupid.

Thiala’s got wings, now, and they’re distracting, but not as distracting as the glow of her warhammer. And neither of those things come anywhere close to as distracting as the single dimple that appears when Thiala smiles at her and waves to her soldiers to retreat. “I missed you,” she says, but Alanis is too busy trying not to think of the way Thiala smiled when she asked Alanis, ever so softly, to destroy Gladeholm, and Alanis had _done it_.

In the stories, if you love someone enough, you can get through to them. In the stories, there’s some saving grace at the last minute that allows you to surmount the insurmountable. In the stories, you don’t burn every last building and every last child of the place where you’d grown up at the request of a woman who thinks she’s doing the right thing, and, most of all, in the stories, you don’t have to _watch yourself do it_.

“Alanis?” Thiala says, and its only then, only when Thiala says her name, that Alanis notices the crown in her left hand, the hand that doesn’t hold the hammer.

It’s the same crown. Against all logic, against all reason, it’s the same crown.

“Yeah,” Alanis says, because she’s more than smart enough for snappy comebacks, but she wasn’t built for this. She’d wanted to be an inventor.

“It’s been a while.” Thiala speaks as if Alanis hasn’t responded, but Alanis can’t help but laugh. Thiala has no fucking clue how long it’s been.

“Yeah,” she responds again. And then lifts her hands for a Disintegrate because, yeah, she may have ulterior motives, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to do some fucking damage first. She pushes past every nerve in her body to make it do max damage, watches Thiala take all of it, and barely notices the necrotic energy settling into her bones. If she’s going to be Thiala’s weapon, she wants to be as garbage a weapon as possible.

Thiala stumbles and summons her Spirit Guardians as a reflex; 8th level, if Alanis is right, which she usually is. They hadn’t used to be angels. They’d used to be just rays of sunlight, a sign of hope. Alanis has seen them in action, nevertheless. She’ll stay out of their way.

“You’re not here to talk?” Thiala says, and all Alanis wants in the world is to just be there to talk.

“’fraid not,” is all she offers, and feels the duration of her Protection Against Evil and Good expire. Fuck. Thiala must have been timing for that, and now Alanis has to choose between putting it back up and getting one more good attack in before letting herself be crowned. (It’s the _same crown_ and her eyes keep getting drawn to it. She remembers how it burned, remembers how hard she had struggled at first and then, eventually, how she had given up.)

The _smart_ thing to do would be to go with the Protection. It would make her more likely to be able to resist when Thiala tries to control her, and she’s always been the smart one. But she doesn’t want to be smart. She’s too busy being angry and pretending not to be terrified – what if it doesn’t _work_ what if she fucks up and has to watch herself kill a world again, what if Thiala’s done something different and the special Counterspell Alanis has been crafting for years is all wrong? She’s gotten used to having the power to reverse time and without it, she feels naked.

Even with ulterior motives, she’s still going to try to kill Thiala. Because a dead Thiala is better than a tricked Thiala, any day. She casts a Finger of Death, another spell she doesn’t normally use, and watches, stomach sinking, as Thiala doesn’t even try to resist it, just takes the damage and then tosses the crown to one of her spiritual angels. Faster than Alanis can react – _fuck,_ she wishes Dispel Magic was a reaction, or that she’d Counterspelled the Guardians when she’d had a chance, why hadn’t she Counterspelled them wait no she has a plan it’s all in the plan – the Spirit Guardians surround her and, like, Alanis is smart but no one has ever accused her of being wise and so she can barely fight back and the crown the crown the crown the

crown.

she feels it

on her

head.

Her thoughts frag

mentandshepanics and –

_Alanis really thought that she’d be able to fix Thiala. That was the crazy thing. She walked up behind her, wrapped her arms around her, asked, “What’s the crown for?” and didn’t questioned it when Thiala said, “It’s for you, to rule beside me, once the world is a better place.” Alanis believed her, even though she’d protested, said they weren’t fit to rule. Thiala laughed and Alanis felt the vibrations of it and held her tighter._

_“If not us, who?” Thiala asked, and Alanis had to admit she kind of had a point. She didn’t_ want _to rule and she didn’t want Thiala to rule, but in the stories, not wanting to rule was always a sign that someone was fit to be a ruler. So. There was that._

_Thiala didn’t even do her the honor of a fight. They were sharing a tent, out on a rare field mission, and it was Thiala’s watch. Alanis_ trusted _her. Not with anyone else, but with her, at least. It was while they loved each other, after all. She thought._

_She woke up on the hard earth and tried to sit up and couldn’t. She thought she was having a bad trip. Or sleep paralysis. One of the two. “Thiala,” she tried to call out, and couldn’t speak. It didn’t matter. Thiala pushed the doorflap aside and stepped inside less than a minute later. Alanis still couldn’t move, but she hadn’t fully panicked yet, hadn’t even noticed the new weight on her head. It was hard to panic when your brain wasn’t connected to the glands in your body that produced the chemicals necessary for panic._

_“Don’t worry, love,” Thiala said, and Alanis relaxed, which was ridiculous. But there were some things bodies did without the permission of their owners. “I commanded you not to move when you awoke. It’s nothing dangerous.”_

_It took Alanis a second to process that. But before she did, before the weight of it sunk in, she saw the sincerity in Thiala’s eyes. She really thought it was nothing dangerous._

_If Alanis were the type of person who screamed, and if she had been able to form the vibrations with her voice box necessary to do so, she would have screamed._

_“Oh!” Thiala said, eyes wide, “Sorry. You can speak.”_

_“I should have fucking killed you like I did the second time –”_

_“Cast Fireball on yourself at the highest level you are currently capable. Maximize the damage. Make me immune.”_

_Alanis watched herself do it. She watched her hands move and her voice speak and she watched the full damage of a 9 th level Fireball burn her body to a crisp. _

_“Again.” Thiala said, as soon as the flames had died, and Alanis wasn’t in control of her body but she sure as hell could feel the pain of it in the nerve endings that hadn’t been cauterized instantly. She sure as hell could feel the stretch of dead skin as she moved her hands again, the gasp in her own voice as she cast a Fireball, 8 th level, this time. _

_The fire knocked her unconscious, but it was the necrotic damage that killed her._

_Thiala brought her back. A Revivify, by the speed of it, and by the pain that had latched on and didn’t seem to want to leave._

_“I’m sorry,” Thiala said. “But I had to be sure. You understand.”_

“I’m sorry,” Alanis hears

Thiala

say and no it’s

not happening not again not

like

last time she can’t

survive that

again

and then the pre-prepared Counterspell and its added Minor Illusion kicks in. The crown still burns, but Alanis has felt worse pain. Thiala is still standing there, and Alanis will still have to do what she says, for now, until the time comes to run, but she is in her own body. She regenerates a first level spell slot, subtly, just to prove to herself that she can. Yeah. _Yeah._

Alanis is Alanis. She will never again be anyone else.


End file.
